Ammonites and Leaping Fish, by Penelope Lively, review

Penelope Lively's latest book gives us a sense of who we are

Penelope Livelydescribes herself as “an archaeologist manqué”. Until now, perhaps the closest she has got to this alternative career is her 1976 book on the history of landscape, The Presence of the Past, but as a novelist she has always had an interest in layers of time. Ammonites and Leaping Fish, which is subtitled “A Life in Time”, is certainly archaeological in its method, digging down into the past to turn up sherds that provide a fragmentary but fascinating portrait not only of the author but of the times through which she has lived.

The book opens with a sharp, unsentimental and ruefully funny account of what it is like, at the age of 80, to be in “the departure lounge”. She is surprised to discover she has got “used to diminishment”, and while regretting her physical inability to garden as she once did, she no longer hankers after foreign travel. She even has a sneaking sympathy for the Department of Work and Pensions as it contemplates a near future in which those over 80 will represent 15 per cent of the UK population.

Lively then tracks back to depict the events that have shaped her and the world in which she has lived: “the accompanying roar of the historical process”. She experienced the Second World War as a child in Egypt and Palestine, and postwar austerities in England at the grim boarding school to which she was sent in 1945. After gaining a degree in history at Oxford, she stayed on as a research assistant during the Suez Crisis, a shaming episode which woke her up to contemporary world events.

Her marriage, the following year, to the historian and political theorist Jack Lively, who came from a Northern working-class background, was also part of the historical process: “two people who could not otherwise have met came together because of the Butler Education Act of 1946”.

Early family life’s backdrop was the nuclear threat at its most acute: “I looked at my small children, on a beach in Swansea, and thought that there was a real chance they would never grow up.” A funny-sinister account of visiting the USSR in 1984 provides a coda to this grimly overshadowed life.

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Apart from the collapse of Communism in Europe, the two most significant and positive changes she has witnessed in her lifetime are “the expectations of women, and attitudes towards homosexuality”, both of which she writes about in a nicely anecdotal manner.

Time, Lively observes, alters everything, while remaining “impersonal, indifferent: it neither knows nor cares”. We nevertheless “have this one majestic, sustaining weapon, this small triumph over time – memory”. How memory operates (or fails to operate), the forms it takes, the sense it gives us of “then folded into now”, is the subject of an absorbing investigation, leading to a description of how her novels were prompted by things she has seen, recalled or read. Reading provides a sense of history, and Lively champions both, for without them we remain “afloat, untethered”.

Lively also argues for “the eloquence of objects” and ends with a consideration of what six things mean to her. In an 18th-century sampler, “a feisty little stitched black dog stands out, demanding attention from 1788”, while a fragment of Egyptian pottery depicting two fishes is eloquent “because it says that a potter a thousand years ago had seen fish leap, because it has travelled through time and space like this, fetching up in 21st-century London, a signal from elsewhere”.

Among Lively’s physical diminishments is myopic macular degeneration, but as a writer she remains clear-sighted and able to pounce upon the smallest, most telling detail with unerring accuracy. She has a true writer’s relish for how words are used, whether revelling in the 17th-century cadences of Sir Thomas Browne’s Urne-Buriall or neatly skewering the self-aggrandisement of military rhetoric: “'I am fighting a terrific battle with Rommel,’ writes Montgomery, sidelining a few hundred thousand others.”

If, as she claims, this enjoyable book is “not quite a memoir”, it is about time and memory, which give us our sense of who we are.